IBM and NEC Team Up to Enable Industry Innovators to Transform their Networks with OpenFlow

On Tuesday, IBM and NEC jointly announced several customers who are adopting a new networking technology called OpenFlow. As you may know, many CEOs and CIOs are hearing the hype around the new OpenFlow protocol for data centers, but what should they know about this technology and how can it benefit their organizations beyond the IT department?

If you have not yet heard of it, OpenFlow is a disruptive networking technology that offers a new level of interoperability and user control and which can ultimately transform the very economics of data centers. OpenFlow has been developed over the past several years at Stanford University as a new way to implement what is known as Software-Defined Networking or SDN.

It was initially created for researchers and universities as a tool to allow experimentation with new protocols and is now showing great promise for today’s highly virtualized enterprise and cloud computing networks.

OpenFlow is being promoted by the Open Networking Foundation founded by six companies that own and operate some of the largest networks in the world — Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon and Yahoo! — as well as close to 50 member companies, including IBM and NEC, as well as other major equipment vendors, software suppliers and IC technology providers. OpenFlow promises a level of benefits to the network similar to what virtualization brings to servers.

I am extremely pleased that IBM and NEC are teaming up to help leading innovators adopt OpenFlow-based networking to transform their networks. Using a new IBM-NEC OpenFlow solution that integrates the OpenFlow-enabled IBM RackSwitch G8264 with NEC’s pFlow controller, these innovators are harnessing OpenFlow to power dynamic networks, manage massive amounts of information and deliver new services.

Stanford University, the originators of the OpenFlow protocol, will deploy IBM and NEC’s solution in a parallel network to test OpenFlow’s applicability to the university’s production environment.

Tervela, provider of a market-leading, distributed data fabric, has validated that this solution delivers a breakthrough in dynamic networking to ensure predictable performance of Big Data for complex and demanding business environments, such as global trading, risk analysis and e-commerce, by automatically segregating network traffic based on real-time statistics.

Selerity, provider of ultra-low latency event data, will employ IBM and NEC’s OpenFlow solution to accelerate real-time decision-making for global financial markets, distributing data across a global low-latency network in an innovative way that can be as much as 1,000 times faster than a conventional server-based application.

OpenFlow has evolved rapidly beyond research and academia to enterprise and IT, and IBM and NEC are leading the industry in building an open ecosystem for OpenFlow innovation and delivering the industry’s first, complete high-performance commercial OpenFlow solution.

This collaboration reflects the reality that the data center network is vital to business, driving new ways for users to control the functionality of networks to meet application requirements, for cloud, Big Data/analytics and high performance computing, more simply, flexibly and intelligently.

For more information about this innovative new solution, please view the following resources:

I am proud to report that IBM holds the leadership position in the emerging market for 40 Gigabit Ethernet in the data center. According to research firm Dell’Oro Group, which recently began tracking the 40G Ethernet market, IBM is the market leader. This leadership position is due to the continued growth of 10G Ethernet, which necessitates 40G uplinks and aggregation switches as delivered by our innovative IBM RackSwitch G8264 and IBM RackSwitch G8316 top-of-rack switches.

In Dell'Oro's first 40G market report for the third calendar quarter of 2011, IBM RackSwitch products held a market share of more than 69%, more than 4 times greater than any other vendor.

The market for 40G Ethernet is still in its infancy. However, as data centers and cloud operators increasingly deploy servers equipped with 10G Ethernet, this drives the need for 40G upstream connectivity. The IBM RackSwitch G8264 and G8316 are ideal in this regard because they can be equipped with 10G server interconnects and 10G uplinks that can be easily upgraded to 40G as requirements demand.

The IBM RackSwitch G8264 is a 10/40G top-of-rack switch specifically designed for applications requiring the highest performance. It combines 1.28 Tbps throughput with up to 4 40G ports or up to 64 10G ports. The RackSwitch G8316 is a 40G top-of-rack aggregation switch that can be configured with either 16 40G ports or up to 64 10G ports. These switches set IBM apart and our leadership position in the emerging market for 40G Ethernet demonstrates that our innovative products are being well received in the marketplace.